Daily Inspiration Quote by Leo Ornstein

“Improvisation is terribly haphazard” lands like a cranky aside, but it’s really a composer drawing a border around what he values: control, architecture, and the slow intelligence of revision. Ornstein wasn’t just any modernist; he was a pianist-composer associated with early-20th-century shock tactics (tone clusters, percussive violence) who later retreated into privacy and long-form craft. From that vantage, the line reads less like a dismissal of spontaneity than a defense of composition as an ethical stance: sound shouldn’t merely happen, it should be made.

The bite is in “terribly.” It’s not “slightly messy” or “sometimes uneven,” but a word that carries both aesthetic judgment and a whiff of moral panic. Ornstein frames improvisation as risk without accountability: a rush of gestures that can feel thrilling in the moment yet fail to cohere once the adrenaline fades. Subtext: modern music already gets accused of chaos; the last thing he wants is to hand critics more evidence that new sounds are just noise, whim, or personality.

Context matters, too. In Ornstein’s era, concert music was busy professionalizing itself against the perceived looseness of the salon, the vaudeville stage, and (implicitly) the Black-origin improvisatory traditions that would soon define jazz’s prestige. His sentence protects a particular hierarchy: the composed score as the site of seriousness. It’s also a little self-revealing. Calling improvisation “haphazard” hints at a fear many composers share: that the unplanned might expose the limits of one’s technique, or worse, the limits of one’s imagination when no manuscript can save you.